Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?: Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

Jeanette describes her childhood home on Water Street in Accrington. It was a narrow house with an outside toilet known as the “Betty.” Until she was fourteen, Jeanette slept in the same room as her parents—when she was fourteen, they divided the space and added a bathroom upstairs.

Though the outside toilet was a “good” place—clean, whitewashed, compact, and the perfect place for reading books in secret, the coal-hole outside—the family’s underground coal bunker, which they used to store the coal needed to heat their house—was “not a good place.” Jeanette was often locked down there as a punishment—sometimes, she says, “a whole day went by before punishment was meted out, and so crime and punishment seemed disconnected.” As a result, she hated Mrs. and Mr. Winterson “with the hatred of the helpless; a flaring, subsiding hatred that became the bed of the relationship.”

Jeanette describes the north of England—historically largely working-class—as a “routinely brutal world” in which physical abuse and punishment were widely accepted. To this day, Jeanette writes, she experiences violent tendencies of her own when angry, but thinks “it is better to [be aware of] who you are, what lies in you, what you might do under extreme provocation.”

Some time after Mrs. Winterson died (which occurred when Jeanette was an adult), Mr. Winterson married his second wife, Lillian. A few years after the marriage, Jeanette recalls, he began hitting Lillian. One day Lillian called Jeanette to tell her that they had been throwing things at each other. Jeanette had never seen her father hit Mrs. Winterson, and he only ever hit Jeanette under Mrs. Winterson’s instructions. When Jeanette arrived at her father’s house, there was broken crockery all over, and Lillian was visibly bruised and upset. Lillian told Jeanette that there was no crockery left, as she had forced Mr. Winterson to throw out Mrs. Winterson’s extensive collection of Royal Albert china when they married and start over.

Jeanette took Mr. Winterson out on a drive, and when she asked him about the fight, he stayed silent for half an hour before breaking down in tears and beginning to tell Jeanette about the war—he had been in the D-Day landings. After explaining his difficulty recovering from the violence of the war, he worries aloud to Jeanette that Mrs. Winterson will not forgive him for remarrying—he confesses that he is “frightened,” and Jeanette thinks he seems like “a little boy,” and realizes that perhaps he always has been.

Jeanette takes Lillian shopping for more crockery. Lillian disparages Mrs. Winterson’s old china, and berates her for having abused both Jeanette and Mr. Winterson.

Jeanette writes that her mother “married down,” and as a result wanted to find a way to show everyone around her that “even though [she wasn’t] better off, [she was] better.” The Royal Albert china was an easy way to do so—and as Mrs. and Mr. Winterson saved their pennies to purchase more and more china, Jeanette, too, found herself swept up in “Royal Albert fever.” The china was one of the only things that made her mother happy, though “happiness was still on the other side of a glass door” for Mrs. Winterson.

Jeanette describes her home life as “a bit odd.” She did not go to school until she was five years old—her grandmother, her mother’s mother, was dying, and the Wintersons were living with Mrs. Winterson’s parents. Jeanette adored her grandmother, and was the one who found her when she died. The Wintersons soon moved back to their narrow home on Water Street, and Jeanette says that this is when she believes her mother’s depression began. Jeanette describes her “odd” childhood and home life in a series of vignettes meant to illustrate the chaotic and distrustful nature of the “Winterson-world.” Mr. Winterson was always either at the factory or at church, while Mrs. Winterson stayed home depressed and languorous most days and sat up awake all night most nights, reading the Bible or baking. Jeanette’s mother watched her constantly for “signs of possession,” and when Jeanette began masturbating around the same time she lost hearing in her ears (due to a problem with her adenoids), her mother blamed the affliction on Jeanette’s badness. When Jeanette was in the hospital having her adenoids out, she was seized with panic, as she believed her mother was taking her to have her “adopted again.”

Jeanette did eventually start school a year late, though her mother believed schools were a “Breeding Ground” for sin. Jeanette was a “bad” child and was given bad reports in school, and often spent her time doodling “picture of Hell which [she] took home for [Mrs. Winterson] to admire.” Jeanette left the school after burning down the play kitchen, and her headmistress told Mrs. Winterson that Jeanette was “domineering and aggressive.” Mrs. Winterson, as she had when Jeanette was a baby screaming day in and day out, once again came to believe that Jeanette was “demon possessed.”

When Jeanette switched to a school farther from home, she did not come home for lunch—instead she took slices of white bread and cheese with her, as the Wintersons had no money for school lunches. Jeanette notes that no one at her school thought this odd—“there were plenty of [other] kids who didn’t get fed properly.”

In the Winterson house, a coal fire provided heat, and Jeanette was in charge of getting it started up in the mornings. Mrs. Winterson would stay up all night, and sleep during the days. Jeanette describes her mother as a “solitary woman who longed for one person to know her,” and wonders if the fact that she now feels she knows her mother, years after her mother’s death, is too little, “too late.”

Jeanette reflects upon the fact that her home “did not represent order and did not stand for safety,” and that she left it at the very young age of sixteen. Just as her mother was unable to build a home for her, Jeanette finds that it is now difficult for her to share a home with anyone else. She has a terrible need for “distance and privacy” because Mrs. Winterson “never respected” her privacy while she lived at home. She never had a key to the narrow house on Water Street, and was entirely dependent on her mother’s mood to be let in or allowed out. Now, in her adult life, Jeanette says that the door to her home is most always open.

Mrs. Winterson, Jeanette says, lived in the same home from 1947 until she died in the year 1990. Her mother “hated the small and the mean, and yet that is what she had.” Jeanette then describes the series of large houses she has bought for herself in adulthood—houses that she says she has bought for herself, and “for the ghost of [her] mother.”

Jeanette feels that the house of her childhood is “held in time or outside of time,” and reflects on the difference between locked and unlocked time, as well as the repetition of religious and cultural rituals that allow a certain moment in time to be entered again and again.

When she left home at the age of sixteen, Jeanette writes, she bought herself a rug, and the rug became a staple of wherever she lived as she bounced from place to place. She knew that the “safe place” of her home could not help her anymore. Though leaving was not the “sensible” thing to do, and though she experienced a time of “mourning, loss, [and] fear,” it was a risk she had to take.